Sunjammer Photo credit: Dave Rizo
Sunjammer’s name neatly sums up its ethos: South Texas groove, gently steamrolling listeners with unhurried, unfussy arrangements and deceptively sophisticated songwriting. Fellow music freaks with overflowing vinyl collections who’ve banded together to create a masterpiece of their own. Their newest self-titled LP, recorded live through buzzing transistors and unspooling magnetic tape, is a refinement and distillation of all previous efforts, wiping the slate clean. A leveling up, a raising of the bar, a cohesive whole.
More than anything, it’s an easy emanation — music that just makes you feel good, no grand statements or pretentious fluff. A calling to music’s higher purpose: to have no purpose at all. The music explains itself by the feeling it shares with the listeners. To simply revel in the joy of being.
Note echoes of familiar names: Farmer Dave’s West Coast Wizards, Lee Baggett, Woods, and more. A jam band for old punk rockers and Spacemen 3 heads. But Sunjammer is on their own groove — it’s puro San Antonio. West Side Sound, Doug Sahm, all the greats…all rolled up and ready to smoke. Easy ride.
About the record, the band tells The Big Takeover,
“In a world of AI slop, Sunjammer may well be the antidote. Self-taught, crunchy, whole-hog analog that only hallucinates on purpose, optimized for nothing but a good hang. We are five humans clocking a decade as a band, shaped around the philosophies of DIY recording, embracing flaws, and taking aim at a vague target. The hips know. The heart. An intuition, maybe a tingle down the spine…you know it when it happens. What comes out might be soul sounds, rural rock, country funk, whatever direction the groove dictates. The groove is paramount. Indifferent to the confines of genre, the goal is to make sounds that can sit next to the gems we unearth as avid listeners.
“This new, self-titled record is a culmination of our efforts and time as a group. It shows a band that has gelled and grown, steady with a slow burn. Tracked live to tape at Good Medicine in SA with Justin Morris and finished out by our very own J. Bloodsworth, we’ve gone hi fi.
“In addition to the core instrumentation, our resident guru John Dailey massaged these arrangements with perfectly placed keyboard flourishes. The studio’s vintage Hammond organ pops up like a favorite spice throughout the album. We were also visited by Eddie Vasquez of the free jazz outfit, The Whale, who came by the studio to sprinkle in some saxophone. There’s a breeze to it all. The whole album has some South Texas air.
“We enlisted an old friend for the album artwork. Milton Holbrook of San Antonio Rose Tattoo hand painted the cover giving the record some instant curb appeal. Enter Tall Texan Records to give this joint a proper release onto the vinyl LP physical format and now we’re really cooking. We’re excited to get this album out to a wider audience and hope that what we’ve found in all this feeling around will resonate with folks out there.
“Either way, we’ll keep on turning on the amps and see what happens. Persistence pays, streaming services do not.”
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